A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Wendigo Meets THE VAMPIRE'S NIGHT ORGY (1973)

My friend Wendigo is often puzzled by European horror films, so naturally to start what I hope will be a regular series of collaborative vampire movie reviews I set him up with a typical European product of the Seventies: Leon Klimovsky's La Orgia Nocturna de los Vampiros, on a murky Mill Creek DVD, albeit a widescreen edition. So what's his beef with the Europeans? He doesn't want to overstate it, but he feels that he's never quite figured them out. Euro-horror's "dream logic" often serves only to leave him unengaged. To him, they often seem to be collections of vignettes united by theme or mood but without real narrative. He understands that he should probably just go with the flow, but for reasons he concedes to be his own he finds that he can't. There has to be more narrative structure to keep him interested. Still, he was game when I invited him to watch the Spanish film for the first time, it being my first try at it as well.

This film opens with a funeral that breaks down in panic when the coffin bursts open to reveal a heap of rich, maggoty corruption. It then takes a group of people who've all been hired to work for the same rich employer on a chartered bus trip that comes to an abrupt halt when their driver drops dead. One of them can drive and takes the bus into a seemingly deserted town where they can stay overnight before deciding what to do with the driver's body. The only person they encounter between the time the driver dies and the time they reach the town is a little boy who plays briefly with Violet, the daughter of one of the employees, but disappears in mid-conversation.

The town of Tonio is identified by a signpost but isn't to be found on maps. It's located in a fog-enshrouded valley where the sun never really comes out. Our characters make themselves at home in an inn overnight, but when one goes out exploring he discovers some of the inhabitants, who have a bad habit of swarming on strangers zombie-style. But the people who work at the inn are on their best behavior when they wake up the remaining visitors for breakfast. They're very hospitable, but their bill of fare leaves something to be desired. They've plenty of baked goods, but "meat's what they need," as a cook says of their guests. Well, meat can be arranged, though the town lacks livestock. All you need is to send Gigante on behalf of "the Countess" to take a spare limb from one of the citizenry, and our diners have meat of an extraordinary quality that Major Boris, a big man in town, assures them can't be found anywhere else. Since there seems to be something wrong with both the bus and another tourist's car, they and the tourist, Luis (Jack Taylor), have little choice but to accept the Countess's hospitality and the run of the town -- and that running gets pretty literal at times.

The Countess (Helga Line) is a benevolent ruler. She provides for her people, dropping the bounty from her window for them to enjoy.

It sank in as we watched that Vampire's Night Orgy is a kind of European version of Herschel Gordon Lewis's 2,000 Maniacs, from the one-by-one picking off of the visitors to the where-did-the-town-go finale. Compared to the American gorefest, however, Klimovsky's film goes fairly easy on the blood, at least in the possibly-edited version we saw. At the same time, the mass swarming attacks that occur throughout the picture may reflect the influence of Night of the Living Dead (Wendigo also suggests The Last Man on Earth) and definitely anticipate the zombie films that would dominate Euro-horror a decade later. The climactic mass attack on the escaping car, with vampires clinging to the speeding vehicle or trying to tip it over, especially impressed Wendigo as the bravura finish the movie needed. Also reminiscent of zombie films for Wendigo was the heroes' utter helplessness. They have no crucifixes of other holy fixes to help them once the vampires close in. Their only real defense, as noted already, is kick-ass modern technology on four wheels.

Wendigo was impressed by the vampires of Tonio, who he claims are more folkloric than cinematic bloodsuckers. Most of them are far from suave, and only the Countess can get away with seducing people with her looks. They don't seem to have any superpowers, and apart from the Countess depend on gang attacks to bring down their prey. There's a definite hierarchy with the Countess as the master vampire and Major Boris as her head minion, the rest being thralls. We actually weren't sure whether the entire population were vampires, as the jacket copy claims. If so, some of them are pretty abject creatures, subject to painful mutilation as it suits the Countess's needs. You wouldn't set a role-playing game in this town, and while Wendigo is a gamer he rather liked this unromantic presentation of a society of vampires. One thing he didn't like about them, however, was their tendency, when killed, to disintegrate into a pile of maggots. The maggot thing is just a pet peeve of his.

The most perplexing thing about the movie is the little boy who befriends Violet. We first suspected him of being a sort of scout vampire, but once he reappeared in town we began to think he was something different, something distinct from the vampire populace of Tonio. This becomes clear when he tries to protect Violet, after allowing her to be trapped in a cemetery, from a host of vampires. But he botches his benevolent mission by smothering the girl in an attempt to stop her from screaming. His remorse is real when he buries her, and we never see him again.

Violet and friend (above). The boy leads the girl into peril but regrets it afterward. Does he even know what he's doing? Does he even know what he is?

For Wendigo, it's typically European that we get no explanation of what the boy is: a ghost, a noble vampire, or who knows? He has a theory that he may be some kind of harbinger or angel of death. He first appears after the bus driver dies. He later leads Violet on a chase that leads her to witness Gigante chopping off a man's arm. His last appearance is a harbinger of Violet's own demise, down to his prefiguring burial of Violet's doll, -- a death which will not turn her into a vampire, which makes her vampirized mom's exhumation of the little body all the more sad. Destroying a child is something American horror doesn't do so often, and Violet's storyline is probably the most effectively creepy part of this movie -- apart from the fact that our eventual hero is a peeping tom. A lesser perplexity is what happens to the town at the end, but that may be because the murky print made us uncertain whether the vampire killed in the escaping car was the Countess or Violet's mom. If it was the Countess, than the town may have disappeared as the breaking of a spell. If not, then it's simply a repetition of the Brigadoon/2000 Maniacs scenario. Wendigo is also still pondering what that opening with the broken coffin has to do with the rest of the movie....

My friend would like to reserve final judgment on this movie until he can get hands on a better copy. But he will say that, despite what he takes to be padding of a pretty thin plot, Vampire's Night Orgy mostly succeeds at what it tries to do -- though it is inexcusable that there isn't really an orgy in the film. And no, an "orgy of killing" doesn't cut it. The story still leaves him asking more questions than he likes, but he found it more coherent than some Euro-horrors he's seen. The happy-sounding Euro-pop that takes up most of the soundtrack still throws him, but it's admittedly an acquired taste. The movie isn't exactly outstanding, but it isn't bad either, and it pulls together enough effectively spooky moments to make it worth a horror fan or vampire buff's while. The latter should find it of interest as a showcase of old-school vampires who wouldn't be the objects of anyone's fantasies. They're simply the hungry dead, and Klimovsky's insistence on this point is a redeeming grace.

2 comments:

I too was frustrated by the marked lack of the promised night-time vampire orgy. Especially with the scrumptious Ms. Line as the head vamp. It's not like she was shy, after all! What a missed opportunity.

This one had its moments, and maybe a better print would help, but overall I cam away pining for what might have been.

Like so many Spanish titles of that era it apparently existed in both a "clothed" version for the Spanish market and a raunchier version for more liberal European markets. The public domain print I saw was the clothed version, and was a truly abysmal print as well.